New template system

[The Large Portion]

By god i'm confused!  Hehe got the forum nicely installed and was hoping to change the theme to something like what the main site is...but I haven't got a hope in hell

In the future, can we expect a tutorial or some sort of write up for how to create your own template?  I'm sure this way is probably much easier but to the untrained eye it looks sooo complicated!

[Redeye]

Join the club 

[bostasp]

As far as I know, they are writing quite a bit of documentation for everything.

There is a little "tutorial" in this thread though: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=3194.0
Hopefully that can be of some use.

[The Large Portion]

Some good and handy information there, cheer bostasp

[Redeye]

I've been playing around and this is the best advice I can give - ***I've no php knowledge*****

Make a copy of index.template.php.
Start looking through the copy and when you spot something that actually looks like english change it radically. I'm going through it and changing colors to bright red (#FF0000)to see what effect and where they show up. It's slow but effective. Just make notes of what changes.
eg:

298    <div style="background-color: #FF0000;"><div style="padding: 2px 30px;', $context['browser']['needs_size_fix'] ? ' width: 100%;' : '', '">';

This seems to be the background for the main index.

Best of luck.

[The Large Portion]

Lol, I've just read your other post and I have to agree with you - whilst you might be able to change more in SMF, the basic template system of Yabb SE was far, far easier to admin than this beast!  Still, this'll be a fun challenge to try and work out...time to get the ole' PHP for dummies book out

[bostasp]

Heh, I think you're right when you call it a "beast"!

The best way to learn it is just to play around

[Ben_S]

The YSE system may have been easier, but you couldn't do anything with it apart from change colours and the overall table width, which meant virtually all YSE boards looked the same.

The new system is sooo much better.

[Peter Duggan]

In the future, can we expect a tutorial or some sort of write up for how to create your own template?

As far as I know, they are writing quite a bit of documentation for everything.

So which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Documentation has been planned for months, but there was limited point in documenting what was still a rapidly changing series of betas with substantive changes being made on a regular basis. Now that we're into public beta and aiming for RC and final, things are starting to happen on the doc front, but please remember that we're still talking *beta* so it's not all going to be ready overnight!